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BA chief executive Alex Cruz has said he will not resign despite disruption caused to hundreds of thousands of travelers over the weekend.

He has claimed the flight disruption had nothing to do with cutting costs, telling BBC News that a power surge, had "only lasted a few minutes", and that the back-up system had not worked properly.

He denied that the IT failure was due to technical staff being outsourced from the UK to India.

Mr Cruz said he was "profusely sorry" to the thousands of passengers still stranded at airports worldwide and claimed around two thirds of passengers will have reached their destination by the end of today.

More than 100,000 passengers have had their half term and Bank Holiday travel plans thrown into chaos after a computer meltdown, with passengers set to face a third day of disruption at Heathrow.

Many have had their flights cancelled, have been separated from their luggage or are now stranded abroad as the airline struggles to recover from Saturday's incident.

And BA - who face a £50 million compensation bill - have now warned travellers that it may be several days before normal service can resume. It has also emerged that the airline refused offers of assistance from its own IT supplier to resolve the problem.

People queue with their luggage outside Heathrow Terminal 5 in LondonCredit:
Reuters

BA has said it will run a full schedule at Gatwick on Monday and it intends to operate a full long-haul schedule and a "high proportion" of its short-haul programme at Heathrow. Both airports have warned travellers to check the status of their flights before leaving home to catch their flight.

Captain Stephen Wearing, who has flown for BA for 29 years, described what greeted him when he flew into Heathrow at the weekend as "the worst chaos I've ever seen".

British Airways pilot Steve Wearing drove a cancer patient home after hours of delays

After landing he and his passengers - along with thousands of others - were told they would simply have to wait.

Inside the terminal, confusion reigned. The first indication that all was not well had come at around 11am when customers trying to access the company’s website to check in or view arrival times were greeted by a single word: “ERROR”.

Ominous though it was, there was no way the message could have prepared them for the full extent of the misery they would have to endure.

At Heathrow and Gatwick, passengers had noticed that BA staff at the check-in desks were taking down details with pen and paper, rather than typing them into the company’s system. Behind the scenes, and unbeknown to the thousands of passengers preparing to fly away for a bank holiday break, the airline’s crucial IT systems had collapsed.

After an eleven-hour flight from Rio, Captain Wearing was told to park until a gate became available.

During the wait of more than three and a half hours passengers read on their phones of the global IT disruption which had left all of BA’s London outbound flights cancelled and thousands of passengers’ holiday plans in tatters.

Cpt Wearing eventually got his passengers on to buses destined for Terminal Five, but one elderly man returning for a cancer operation was too frail to walk.

Cpt Wearing told the Telegraph: “Victor was ill with cancer, he’d had two strokes and we’d had to move him to Club to lie down.

“It was an unbelievable situation. It was the worst I’ve experienced. That’s why we thought it was maybe malicious: everything was down.

“I had 200 people who I could talk to personally so I wandered up the down the plane for two hours, talking to everyone.”

After asking the man his onward travel plans, Cpt Wearing phoned the friend due to pick up his passenger, only to learn that he was now unavailable having understood the flight to have been cancelled. So he took matters into his own hands.

“There was a two hour wait for the people who transport wheelchair passengers, so I got my two bags and Victor and I pushed him through.”

Cpt Wearing, 61, then drove the pensioner, whom he described as “incredibly grateful”, home to Chelsea himself.

The airline has not denied this, although it has hit back strongly against suggestions that the failure was due to a cyber attack, after the Royal United Services Institute questioned how a “power outage” could really cause such a systemic failure.

Ewan Lawson, an expert an expert at the think tank, said: “I would not write off the possibility that there's been an attack on the software, either from the outside or by a disgruntled employee.”

The software used by the Germany-based company, Altea, is shared by a number of other airlines, yet for some reason only BA were unable to access the vital data.

By 4.30pm, BA conceded it would have to cancel the rest of the day’s flights.

A scramble for nearby accommodation ensued, and many exasperated passengers could find no rooms cheaper than £1,000 for the night.

Those who stayed in the airports were left to sleep on yoga mats, as conference rooms were opened to provide make-shift dormitories.

As Sunday morning broke, Heathrow Terminal 5 was again descending into chaos. Travellers were told not to arrive at the airport more than 90 minutes before their flight in a bid to keep down queues. However, even those two turned up at 5am reported having no idea about flight information by midday.

"It's affected so many people. Some 80-year-old lady was standing around waiting for announcements, et cetera - and she fell over."

The company’s Chief Executive, Alex Cruz, has apologised for the “huge inconvenience” caused by the failure.

But the former budget airlines boss has been accused of triggering the crisis by outsourcing hundreds of in-house IT jobs to India. Since being appointed in April last year, Mr Cruz has overseen a cost-cutting drive that removed free food from short-haul flights and has seen customer satisfaction plunge.

A Which? report in December last year found that average customer satisfaction with BA had fallen to 67 per cent for short-haul and 60 per cent for long-haul flights, putting it 10th in a table of 23 British carriers.

A spokesman for the airline said: “We are extremely sorry for the disruption caused to customers and understand how much frustration this is causing.”